Governor’s Office of Adoption and Child Protection

Summary

The State of Florida's social marketing campaign for adopting children who were wards of the state was extremely successful, but also exposed serious challenges within the adoption system. Change by Design was hired to help.

The foster care and adoption system in Florida required a serious overhaul. This fact became painfully obvious when a successful marketing campaign led so many people interested in adopting children to overwhelm the capacity of the current system. Calls were not returned and hopes were dashed.

Enter Change by Design! After hearing the challenges, we knew this was a system-wide performance failure, not a training issue.

We believed the key was to take advantage of the combined understanding of stakeholders who represented every aspect of Florida’s foster care and adoption system. This included adoptive parents, academicians, child welfare advocates, foster care workers, and many others.

After many anonymous stakeholder interviews, we came to understand the deep challenges of the system. Change by Design leveraged the power of this large knowledge community using its problem-solving training to solve the deep multi-faceted underlying issues.

In the end, Change by Design helped these passionate stakeholders identify six major areas contributing to the problems faced in the adoption of children in foster care. Working together, they developed a set of detailed recommendations that, when implemented, would solve the problem.